The Political Economy Effects of the Bologna Process

Using a staggered difference-in-difference design, we study the consequence of the largest ever market-oriented transformation in higher education – the ‘Bologna process’ – on the ideology and socioeconomic outcomes of European Millennials. We find that the reform persistently and substantially elevated the students’ individualist concern for social status over their universalist concern for global justice, values conforming with ‘liquid modernity’ over ‘solid modernity’ and the salience of economic over sociocultural goals. The ‘self-interest bias’ is orthogonal to the traditional left-right cleavage in attitudinal or behavioural metrics and emerges absent any significant change in long-term income, wealth, unemployment, or occupational prestige. Through a direct mechanism of political socialisation, the globalisation of European higher education increased the perceived importance of status without improving it, shifting the educated class away from its presumed role in endorsing cosmopolitan causes. Institutionally-driven status anxiety, not idiosyncratic generational morals, constructs the ‘student customer’.